


too old to die young

by alamorn



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, implied and understood jack/charles and jack/anne but neither enough to tag for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 12:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15908484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/pseuds/alamorn
Summary: Jack didn't believe the news.





	too old to die young

**Author's Note:**

> I'm doing bingo squares as warm-ups and the incomparable feoplepeel suggested Charles and Jack for either Death or Waking Up Alone on the angst bingo. I decided on death.
> 
> As a warm-up, this was written deliberately vague on the timeline for fear of interrupting the flow with canon review or fact checking. If I've gotten something horribly wrong, let me know.

He wasn’t there when Charles died. He had to learn of it from the news. He didn’t believe it at first, though he’d long thought Eleanor would be Charles’ death. But Charles was always and ever vibrantly alive. Even at his most self-destructive, Jack had thought Charles more alive than other men. So he’d thought it a ruse at first. A trick. Charles would find him in a bar and make Jack buy him a drink, and rasp, “You thought I could die that easy? No faith.”

With every bar that Charles did not appear in, that hope grew dimmer. He’d never known Charles to be a patient man, and this was not his sort of game. What would he gain?

When he made the mistake of telling Anne his thoughts, she snorted. “Stupid,” she said. “Weren’t his way.”

“No, I suppose not.”

She glanced sidelong at him, the whites of her eyes glinting in the shadow of her hat. The ship pitched into the trough of a rough wave and she rode it with an easy shift of her weight as Jack grabbed the railing. A splinter dug into his palm.

“Shit,” he said, drawing his palm to his mouth to suck the splinter out. “Just my fucking luck.”

“Let me,” she said, pulling his hand to her. Anne had fingers as clever as Jack’s tongue — more, really, as her hands got them into trouble only half as often as his tongue.

When she’d pulled the splinter, Jack stared at the blood welling on his palm. It was a small drop, for the size of the splinter, which seemed unfair. Such a painful injury should leave a mark. “I wish we’d been there,” he told the ocean as the spray dampened his face.

“You think he’d’ve fought harder if your ugly face was in the crowd?” Anne asked.

“It was my fault he was captured. I should have been there.”

“It was the cunt’s _fault_ ,” Anne spat. “It was that bastard Rogers’ fault. It was his own damn fault. It weren’t yours.”

“You say the sweetest things, darling.”

She scoffed. “Come find me when you’re done sulking.”

He stayed at the railing a while longer, until his face was not so wet.


End file.
